When we're not up to our ears in lab
research, we - the European branch of AnandTech - like to increase our
knowledge of subjects in some classier ways. For example, by traveling down to
Cannes to cover VMware's first VMworld conference in Europe, taking place in
the palais des festivals, especially known for its annual hosting of the film
festival. The conference hosted over 4500 visitors and 96 exhibitors, and tons
of hour-long sessions were held throughout the 3-day conference (26th - 28th of
February).

A
view of Cannes' harbor from the balcony of the palais.

Our
interest for this mostly software-related conference stems from the technology's
amazing potential in the business IT-market, which is a subject we definitely
don't want to keep from our readers.

A
bit of info on VMware may be interesting at this point, so here's a quick
rundown. Celebrating its 10th anniversary in 2008, VMware employs over 5000
people worldwide in 54 offices, and offers its virtualization services to over
100.000 customers. It's easily the biggest player in the field at this point,
and is still working on strengthening that position through partnerships with
many of the big hardware manufacturers.

Yours
truly eagerly awaiting the start of the conference…

Virtualization
has come a very long way in the past couple of years, and VMware's efforts to
push this technology into every segment of the business IT world has encouraged
many companies to start experimenting with it. Thanks to that, many new ways
have been discovered to integrate virtualization in a way that makes the
environment even more flexible, and some of those interesting new takes were
displayed at VMworld. In this article, we've bundled together coverage of some
of the items we saw, summarized here:

IBM
breaks a Microsoft Exchange performance record with the use of ESX

BEA rocking the Java world with LiquidVM

Parallels offering their own take on virtualization with a suite of
products for several platforms

Richard McDougall offers some insights on running databases in a
virtualized environment

We've
tried to cover as many bases as possible, but the vast amount of subjects made
complete coverage impossible. Definitely check out Johan's IT blogs and article
for his experiences, though. Now let's take a closer look at the above items.